On 28 September 1946 in Nowy Sącz, the investigative judge of the Regional Court in Nowy Sącz, with its seat in Nowy Sącz, in the person of Investigative Regional Judge T. Kmiecik, with the participation of a reporter, senior court registrar M. Berzińska, interviewed the person specified below as a witness, without an oath. Having been advised of the criminal liability for making false declarations and of the wording of Article 107 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, the witness testified as follows:
| Name and surname | Marian Dybus |
| Date of birth | 13 August 1921 |
| Parents’ names | Tadeusz and Wiktoria |
| Place of residence | Nowy Sącz, Kunegundy Street 14 |
| Occupation | secondary school student |
| Religious affiliation | Roman Catholic |
| Criminal record | none |
| Relationship to the parties | none |
I was arrested on 29 April 1940, while I was working in a coal warehouse on Kunegundy Street, located right in front of my and my parents’ flat, no. 14. About 9 a.m., four Gestapo officers came by car and detained me based on a list I saw in their hands. Immediately after the arrest, I was taken to the prison in Nowy Sącz. That day there were mass arrests of young people from Nowy Sącz, so the total number of arrested young men amounted to more than a hundred. All of them were arrested based on the prepared list, I know because my friends and colleagues also confirmed the existence of such a list.
I would like to point out that I did not belong to any political or underground organization before or during the war. Right before the war, I belonged to the Polish Scouting Association for a year.
On the second day after the arrest, the arrested people were interrogated in the Gestapo office in groups of ten. The interrogation was short and routine. It consisted in answering questions such as: did you belong to the Military Training Organization or Polish Army before the war; are you a secondary school student; have you belonged or do you belong to any political organization; do you listen to the radio; do you own a radio; do you own a gun; do you know anything about leaflets; do you know who has a gun and who has a radio? As far as I remember, I said no to all those questions – as did the nine colleagues from my group who were interrogated at the same time as myself. When I was put in prison, other inmates told me that if during the interrogation someone answered the questions with less conviction or hesitated, he was interrogated separately. Such prisoners were brought back to prison later than the rest, which made those who had already been questioned wonder. I do not know the result of the separate interrogations because I was afraid to ask the prisoners for details.
I got the impression that in the group of young men arrested on 28 April, there were also people who pretended to be arrested and those who already worked for the Gestapo. I believed this to be true because on the third or fourth day after the arrest, two men, Batki and Chruślicki, and a third person, whose name I have already forgotten, were released. As I found out later on, both Batko and Chruślicki were indeed informers. Batko was shot by the executives of an underground organization, which was a well-known event in Nowy Sacz. I do not know what happened to Chruślicki.
Until 10 May 1940, the day when all the arrested people were transferred, nobody else was released from jail. That day at noon, we were loaded onto about ten trucks and escorted by German policemen to the prison in Tarnów, where we arrived on that same day. I stayed in that prison until 13 June 1940. No unusual events or further interrogation took place.
During the one-month stay in the Tarnów prison, I noticed that more and more new groups from various towns – Jarosław, Kraków, Przemyśl and Rzeszów – were being brought to the prison. When the prison was heavily overcrowded, a transport of 700 or more people was formed. Those prisoners came from different spheres, were of different ages and worked in different occupations. There were no women in that transport.
When I had been in the Auschwitz concentration camp for two years, an inmate, whose name I cannot remember, who was a clerk in the Political Department office and had access to prisoners’ personal files, told me that when I arrived at the camp on 13 June 1940, my files included a verdict by the local Gestapo, that is from Nowy Sącz: I was sentenced to remain in the concentration camp until the end of the war for a hostile attitude towards the German Reich. The verdict consisted of a single term in German, which I cannot remember. In any case, I know that I was sentenced on the suspicion of hostile attitude towards the Reich.
At 3.00 p.m., the transport entered a railway siding on the camp premises. The train cars were opened and the prisoners were released one by one. They were instructed to go through a winding corridor made of barbed wires, just like wild animals are released from cages into the circus arena. Every few steps in this corridor there were SS men who beat the prisoners with everything they had – revolvers, clubs, whips, bullwhips, rifles. There were about 30 SS men in the corridor, so each of the prisoners, who were beaten and thus forced to run through the corridor, must have received at least a dozen lashes, usually in the head. At the end, the prisoners were usually covered in blood. At the square, the so-called Kapos, recruited from among German criminals, wearing green badges, divided the prisoners in groups of ten. From the very beginning, the Kapos were equally violent towards the prisoners whom they guarded. After their names were written down, large groups of prisoners were transferred to the individual blocks that formed camp I.
During the first month, political prisoners did not work but only participated in sport activities which were a form of torture. The “sport activities” consisted in forcing prisoners to roll 20 meters between two strips of burning straw. SS men stood over the prisoners and kicked them into the fire so that they burned themselves, and when the prisoners came out, their clothes were destroyed. Another “sport activity” consisted in running in circles and marching. If a prisoner mixed up the steps or stepped out of the line while marching, the SS men pulled him out and beat him until he fainted or even died.
These kinds of “sport activities” began every day, regardless of the weather, at 6.00 a.m. and lasted continuously until 12.00. Then, there was an hour break for lunch and afterwards the activities started again and lasted until 6.00 p.m.
During the so-called sport activities, prisoners had to be really careful to avoid being hit by the SS men lurking at every opportunity. Already in the first month, there were victims of such sport activities. The prisoners were so exhausted, tired, self-absorbed and driven by their self-preservation instinct that they forgot about their closest friends. Therefore, they did not notice if other prisoners, who had died at night, did not wake up in the morning.
For me, one of the toughest experiences in the initial period of the stay in the camp was the long, forced standing at the roll-call square, which was ordered by the camp commandant, SS-Obersturmbannführer Rudolf Höß after a roll call. It lasted from 6.00 p.m. to midnight and was caused by the escape of a prisoner, Wiejowski, who had fled while working outside the camp. Höß announced to all prisoners that they would stand there until the escapee was found. At the same time, he ordered SS men to search for him. Since the SS men were not allowed to go to sleep due to the forced standing, they got more and more enraged and took their frustration out on the prisoners. Within the first six hours, all prisoners who were elderly and thus weak collapsed unconscious. If someone moved during the forced standing, he received a blow from watchful SS men and German Kapos. If they spotted even the slightest move, they suddenly leaped and beat the prisoners, who were so exhausted that they were barely standing on their feet. In this way, when I was tottering from exhaustion, I was hit in the back of the head with a stick by a German Kapo, who woke me up with the blow and said “Guten Morgen.” Due to the fact that the escapee was not found by midnight, Höß gave an order to continue the forced standing for another six hours, until 6.00 a.m. I would like to point out that all prisoners who were obliged to participate in the evening roll call, thus sick hospital patients as well, took part in the forced standing. All prisoners who were not able to walk from the hospital on their own were taken to the square by healthier inmates who held them by the arms during the roll call.
During the next six hours, there were even more victims of the forced standing. Despite the search, the escapee was not found by 6.00 a.m. Commandant Höß gave an order to continue the forced standing until noon. There were more and more victims.
During the third forced standing, all prisoners who worked in the same group as the runaway or those who might know anything about the details of his escape or the direction he was headed, were beaten – they received 25 lashes on the buttocks. They rarely stood up after such beating.
At noon, commandant Höß called over a camp doctor, Hauptsturmführer Popiersch, a Hungarian, who walked between the rows of prisoners and ordered a break at 2.00 p.m., that is after 19 hours of uninterrupted standing, and allowed us to go back to the block.
Following the forced standing, nearly one third of the prisoners, that is about 500 people, did not return to the block. They died of exhaustion, heart attack, heat, or because of the beating.
The corpses that were left at the roll-call square were collected by hospital orderlies. It was roughly at that time that the camp authorities started to burn corpses in the crematorium built just by the camp entrance gate.
That roll call, followed by the forced standing that lasted so long, took place at the end of August 1940, that is at the end of the third month of the camp’s existence.
Practical activities for political prisoners in the camp began after a month devoted to “sport activities.” At that time, the camp authorities started to expand the concentration camp on a large scale, especially since more and more new transports of political prisoners were being brought there. If a prisoner escaped while at work, we were again forced to stand after roll call for three or four hours. During the forced standing, camp leader (Lagerführer) Fries, in consultation with Höß, and in his presence, chose ten, and later on even twenty, political prisoners for each escapee – to shoot them dead. By Höß’s order, each such selection for execution was announced by an interpreter to all prisoners gathered at the roll-call square, and then it was immediately performed.
I witnessed once when a prisoner who had been selected to be executed asked Fritzsch to spare him, and a priest named Kolbe volunteered to be taken instead of him. He was transferred to block 11, where he was starved for a long time, and later on received a phenol injection, which killed him.
Injections were a speciality of Oberscharführer Klehr, while Oberscharführer Palitzsch specialized in shooting people in block 11.
One of the first mass shootings of Poles in block 11 took place when a group of over 300 prisoners from Lublin were executed, that was at the end of 1943.
Before that incident, masses of prisoners of other nationalities were executed in block 11: Jews, Russians, Slovaks; but the majority of them were Poles captured during guerrilla operations in the area of the so-called General Government. Moreover, I know about a mass shooting of 72 Poles from Kraków from the city gasworks. I saw the mass execution from the roof of an adjacent block. The shooting was carried out in the following way: the prisoners kneeled down next to each other in groups of ten, and the SS men shot at them from hand- held machine guns. After a group of ten prisoners was executed in this way, another group was shot and it continued until all the prisoners were killed. In the meantime, camp [deputy] commandants Fritzsch and Palitzsch, who were present there, approached those who were still alive and finished them off.
Most of the shootings took place each week on Tuesdays and Fridays. Höß, the commandant of the whole camp, deputy camp commandant (Lagerführer) Fritzsch, Oberscharführer Palitzsch, Unterscharführer Lachmann, Oberscharführer Boger, Unterscharführer Kaduk, Oberscharführer Claussen, and a number of less important SS men would gather in block 11. Seeing that, the prisoners immediately realized that there would be a mass execution of the prisoners who had been placed in that block.
Initially, such executions took place by day, so no efforts were made to hide them. Of course, the sound of shots had a disheartening effect on prisoners in the camp. A little later, Palitzsch had a machine gun at his disposal, which was very quiet. In general, everything in that block was designed to muffle the sounds of gunfire – only a well-trained ear could hear when prisoners in block 11 were being shot. While some SS men were shooting, many others were watching the last moments of the executed prisoners’ lives with sadistic pleasure.
In addition to the place intended for shootings between block 10 and 11, mass executions were also carried out in the so-called [illegible] near the camp guardhouse and in crematorium I.
From 24 December 1941, I worked in the camp as a hospital orderly. One of my tasks was to collect the corpses of executed prisoners, load them onto a cart and take them to the crematorium. Other political prisoners did this as well.
As a hospital orderly, my duty was to take the patients’ temperature, put on dressings, wash and feed the sick, report deaths, transfer prisoners to block 11 if they were sentenced to death based on documents from outside the camp, and to carry the dead on a cart to the crematorium. What is more, I took prisoners who had been hanged during a roll call off the gallows on two occasions.
During the two years that I worked in the hospital as an orderly, I noticed that prisoners who arrived in transports from Warsaw found it extremely difficult to adapt to the living conditions in the camp, as a result of which they quickly experienced a mental breakdown, followed by a physical breakdown and death. It was evident that they were psychologically vulnerable and fell into despair. Such prisoners did not care about food hygiene and devoured dirty potato peels, and various kinds of food waste, even though they were aware of the consequences of eating things like that, such as diarrhea and other gastrointestinal diseases.
In the middle of 1943, the mortality in the camp was the highest – it reached 3,000 people per day. This was including prisoners who died in the hospital and in the camp, but not including those who were selected to be gassed or shot due to exhaustion. I saw this number in the daily reports compiled in the hospital office – I brought reports there from the room that I was in charge of.
In October 1941, a Soviet transport of prisoners of war, consisting of 13,000 people, was brought to the camp. The whole transport was exterminated in less than half a year. The circumstances that contributed to the extermination of that transport were the following: for breakfast, the prisoners received black coffee, for dinner – a quarter of a liter of soup made of cooked rutabaga, and 150 grams of bread for supper. Of course, those portions were given only to those who had enough energy to walk to the cauldron with coffee or soup, or to approach the person who was distributing bread. What is more, the prisoners had nothing to cover themselves with at night. As a result of such treatment and nutrition, there was an outbreak of typhoid and typhus fever, which spread even to the Polish camp. This disease greatly increased the mortality rate, but it was still not enough to quickly exterminate that group of Soviet prisoners of war. Around the end of November 1941, SS men began to gas groups of prisoners in block 11 and, at the same time, they started the mass shootings in the courtyard of the same block. I saw Germans rushing naked prisoners to block 11 by day. Each of the prisoners wore only a leather belt, because they were being tricked to go to that block: they had been promised that they would get new clothes there, and then they would be transported to a different block. This was supposed to stop the spread of typhus. About 200 people were gassed simultaneously. In this way, the Germans gassed three groups. At night, as a hospital orderly, together with other orderlies and physicians with gas masks, I had to empty the chambers in the basement of block 11. While performing this task, two orderlies got poisoned. We carried the gassed people outside the camp on two platforms.
There, we hid them in a mass grave, putting them one on top of another and dusting them with chlorine. We transported the gassed and shot prisoners to that mass grave for four days without a break, that is, day and night. By night, the platforms were covered with tarps. The orderlies who had to hide the Soviet prisoners in the mass grave received double portions of food during those four days.
If some Soviet prisoners, before they were gassed or shot, sometimes looked relatively well, this can be explained by the fact that some people, desperately wanting to survive, treated their colleagues with wild and animal ruthlessness and consumed their food at their expense whenever they could.
The conditions in the camp made people develop animal instincts.
Every month, the so-called Monatsbericht [monthly reports] were sent to Berlin from the hospital. Inmates who worked in the camp offices told me in secret what was the number of the sick, deceased and cured prisoners reported in the Monatsberichts. Comparing that number with what I actually saw and with the lists made in the hospital office, I came to the conclusion that they were significantly altered. The number of sick prisoners was smaller; the mortality was expressed in smaller numbers, while the reported number of cured patients was higher. Those alterations were made by the same SS officers who prepared the Monatsberichts.
I remember that roughly a month after the burial of the Soviet prisoners of war (about 8,000 people buried in a single mass grave), an order was issued to exhume the corpses, transport them to the crematorium and burn them. This was probably caused by external factors, perhaps as a result of articles published in the foreign press. The grave itself was covered with dirt, newly planted trees and grass − so now it would be very difficult to find that place.
I stayed in the Auschwitz concentration camp until October 1944 and I know that throughout that period – with a brief break – Rudolf Höß was the commandant of the entire camp. During the break, this position was held by Sturmscharführer Liebehenschel, former commandant of the camp in Majdanek, which at that time was taken over by the Soviet army as it moved west. However, Liebehenschel turned out to be more humane and Rudolf Höß, a war criminal and murder, was appointed camp commandant again.
Polish people in the camp called Höß “Polenfresser.” He hated Poles so much that he seemed to experience a nervous shock every time he met a Polish prisoner. He personally did not beat prisoners, but he was always accompanied by a lower-ranking SS man and he always tried to find a pretext to beat and abuse prisoners he encountered, and he encouraged the SS man accompanying him to do so.
Prisoners who met Höß were abused even for failing to stay at an appropriate distance from the commandant or to bow to him on time or in a proper manner, or for any negligence related to their posture or behavior.
During my stay in the camp, I never had direct contact with Höß. While working as a hospital orderly, and after two years as a lab technician in the camp pharmacy, I did not directly witness such criminal acts as the gassing of Jewish transports arriving from all over Europe and transports of people of other nationalities: Poles, Slovaks, Russians, French, Hungarians, Yugoslavians or others. Such transports never made it to the camp, but went straight to the gas chambers, and then to the crematoria − as a result of which smoke spread over Birkenau, as described extensively in a book by Seweryna Szmaglewska.
The witness attaches to the report photographs of artistic drawings made by the painter Siwak, a former Auschwitz prisoner, currently staying in the West in the English zone.
The witness reserves the right to have the attached photos of Unterscharführer Kaduk, Oberscharführer Claussen and Oberscharführer Boger returned after the trial.